HISTORY OF ROMAN CLASSICAL LITERATURE. years, Roman virtue and greatness seemed to his imagination magnified: he could lament, as Horace did, a gradual decay which had not as yet reached its worst point: "Etas parentum pejor avis tulit Nos nequiores mox daturos But the people did not sympathise with these feelings: they delighted in action, not in contemplation and reflection. They did not look back upon their national heroes as demigods, or dream over their glories: they were pressing forward and extending the frontiers of their empire, bringing under their yoke tribes and nations which their forefathers had not known. If they regarded their ancestors at all, it was not in the light of men of heroic stature as compared with themselves, but as those whom they could equal or even surpass: they lived in hope, and not in memory. These are not the elements of character which would lead a people to realize to themselves the ideal of tragedy. The tragic poet at Athens would have been sure that the same subject which inspired him would also interest his audience that if his genius rose to the height which their critical taste demanded, he could reckon up the sympathy of a theatre crowded with ten thousand of his countrymen. A Roman tragic poet would have been deserted for any spectacle of a more stirring nature: his most affecting scenes and noblest sentiments, for scenes of real action and real life. The bloody combats of the gladiators, the miserable captives and malefactors stretched on crosses, expiring in excruciating agonies, or mangled by wild beasts, were real tragedies: the sham fights and Naumachiæ, though only imitations, were real dramas, in which those pursuits which most deeply interested the spectators, which constituted their chief duties and highest glories, were visibly represented. Even gorgeous spectacles fed their personal vanity and pride in their national greatness. The spoil of conquered nations, borne in procession across the stage, reminded them of their triumphs and their victories; and the magnificent dress of the actors-the model of the captured city, preceded and followed by its sculptures in marble and ivory-represented in mimic grandeur the ovation or the triumph of some successful general, whose return from a distant expedition, laden with wealth, realized the rumours which had already arrived at the gates of Rome; whilst the scene, glittering with glass, and gold, and silver, and adorned with variegated pillars of foreign marble, told ostentatiously of their wealth and splendour. Again, the Romans were a rough, turbulent people, full of physical rather than intellectual energy, loving antagonism, courting peril, setting no value on human life or suffering. Their very virtues were stern and severe. The unrelenting justice of a Brutus, representing as it did the victory of principle over feeling, was to them the height of virtue. They were ready to undergo the extreme of physical torture with Regulus, and to devote themselves to death like Curtius and the Decii. Hard and pitiless to themselves, they were, as might be expected, the same towards others. They were, in fact, strangers to both the passions, which it was the object of tragedy to excite and to purify, Pity and Terror. They were too stern to pity, too unimaginative to be moved by the tales of wonder and deeds of horror which affected the tender and marvel-loving imagination of the Greeks. Being an active, and not a sentimental people, they did not appreciate moral suffering and the struggles of a sensitive spirit. They were moved only by scenes of physical suffering and agony. The public games of Greece at Olympia or the Isthmus were bloodless and peaceful, and the refinements of poetry mingled with those which were calculated to invigorate the physical powers and develop manly beauty. Those of Rome were exhibitions, not of moral, but of physical courage and endurance: they were sanguinary and brutalizing,-the amusements of a nation to whom war was not a necessary evil or a struggle for national existence, for hearths and altars, but a pleasure and a pastime the means of gratifying an aggressive ambition. The tragic feeling of Greece is represented by the sculptured grief of Niobe; that of Rome by the death-struggles which distort the features and muscles of Laocoon. It was, if the expression is allowable, amphitheatrical, not theatrical. To such a people the moral woes of tragedy were powerless: and yet it is to the people that the drama, if it is to flourish, must look for patronage. A refined and educated society, such as always existed at Rome during its literary period, might applaud a happy adaptation from the Greek tragedians, and encourage a poet in his task; for it is only an educated and refined taste which can appreciate such talent as skilful imitation displays, but a tragic drama under such circumstances could hardly hope to be national. Nor must it be forgotten, with reference to their taste for spectacle, that the artistic accessories of the drama would have a better chance of success with a people like the Romans than literary merit, because the pleasures of art are of a lower and more sensuous kind. Hence, in the popular eye, the decoration of the theatre and the costume of the performers naturally became the principal requisites, whilst the poet's office was considered subordinate to the manner in which the play was put upon the stage; and thus the degenerate theatrical taste which prevailed in the well-deserved criticism. days of Horace called forth the poet's well-known and There is one exception which we must make to our general commendation of Professor Browne's treatment of the early Roman writers -we mean, part of his criticism on Lucilius. It contains an error singular in itself, and involves an extraordinary misconception of some wellknown passages in Horace. Professor Browne says of Lucilius (p. 145)-"His real defect was want of facility; and it is not improbable that if prose had been considered a legitimate vehicle, he would have preferred pouring forth, in that unrestricted form, his indignant eloquence, rather than that, as Horace says, every verse should have cost him many scratchings of the head, and biting his nails to the quick." We ought, perhaps, to apologize to our clasin Horace sical readers for quoting the passages Horace which are here so strangely misunderstood. says of Lucilius (Sat. I. iv. 8) that he was Durus componere versus, In the tenth Satire of the same Book Horace and maintains his right to criticise his prede- Quærere num illius, num rerum dura negarit He there asserts, that if Lucilius had lived in a later age, Detereret sibi multa; recideret omne, quod ultra Perfectum traheretur: et in versu faciendo Sæpe caput scaberet, vivos et roderet ungues. We hope that there are few Somerset-House students who would misapprehend these passages of Horace as our author has done. The word durus, as applied by Horace to Lucilius, seems to have been the main cause of Professor Browne's error. He evidently interprets it as implying that Lucilius was hard (costive, as it were,) in composition. But of course the meaning of Horace is to censure Lucilius for the rugged rapidity of his verse-for his folly in indulging in, and even boasting of, a fatal facility of composition, while he disliked the trouble of retrenching and correcting. There is another queer slip of Professor Browne's as an Horatian scholar, which he makes in his account of the elder Cato. He says of him, "Cato, with all his virtues, was a hard-hearted man" (p.161). The remark is true enough; but Mr. Browne unfortunately backs it up by a reference to Horace. Od. ii. Ï. He here applies the fine stanza Audire magnos jam videor duces to Cato the Censor, instead of to Cato of Utica, to whose "stern spirit,' as displayed amidst the woes of civil war, the poet was paying homage. It is strange that he could have so completely forgotten the preceding stanzas. The very first line of the Ode, in which Horace says that Pollio was describing the Motum ex Metello consule civicum, ought to have kept a critic clear of this portentous blunder. If Professor Browne has done the elder Cato any wrong by trying to make a piece of evidence tell against him, which only appliesand that favourably-to his descendant, he has done full justice to the stern old Censor by an excellent account of his writings. We quote the part that speaks of Cato's agricultural treatise. Circumstances invest his treatise "De Re Rustica" with great interest. The population of Rome, both patrician and plebeian, was necessary agricultural. For centuries they had little commerce: their wealth consisted in flocks and herds, and in the conquered territories of nations as poor as themselves. The Ager Romanus, and subsequently, as they gained fresh acquisitions, the fertile plains, and valleys, and mountain sides of Italy, supplied them with maintenance. The statesman and the general, in the intervals of civil war or military service, returned, like Cincinnatus and Cato, to the cultivation of their fields and gardens. The Roman armies were recruited This fine translation of "atrocem animum" is Hallam's. He well applies the phrase to Coligni, from the peasantry, and when the war was over the soldier returned to his daily labour; and, in later times, the veteran, when his period of service was completed, became a small farmer in a military colony. To a restless nation, who could not exist in a state of inactivity, a change of labour was relaxation; and the pleasures of rural life, which were so often sung by the Augustan natural atmosphere seemed to be either politics or war. poets, were heartily enjoyed by the same man whose Besides the possession of these rural tastes the Romans were essentially a domestic people. The Greeks were social; they lived in public; they had no idea of home. Women did not with them occupy a position favourable to the existence of home-feeling. The Roman matron was the centre of the domestic circle: she was her husband's equal, sometimes his counsellor, and generally the educator of his children in their early years. Hundreds of sepulchral inscriptions bear testimony to the sweet charities of home-life, to the dutiful obedience of children, the devoted affection of parents, the fidelity of wives, the attachments of husbands. Hence, home and all its pursuits and occupations had an interest in the eyes of à Roman. For this reason there were so many writers on rural and domestic economy. From Cato to Columella we have a list of authors whose object was instruetion in the various branches of the subject. They are thus enumerated by Columella himself:-" Cato was the first who taught the art of agriculture to speak in Latin; after him it was improved by the diligence of the two Sasernæ, father and son; next it acquired eloquence from Scrofa Tremellius; polish from M. Terentius (Varro); poetic power from Virgil." To their illustrious names he adds those of J. Hyginus, the Carthaginian Mago, Corn. Celeus, J. Atticus, and his disciple J. Græcinus. The work of Cato, "De Re Rustica," has come down to us almost in form and substance as it was written. It has not the method of a regular treatise. It is a common-place book of agriculture and domestic economy, under 163 heads. The subjects are connected, but not regularly arranged; they form a collection of useful instructions, hints, and receipts. Its object is utility, not science. It serves the purpose of a farmers' and gardeners' manual, a domestic medicine, a herbal, a cookery-book: prudential maxims are interspersed, and some favourite charms for the cure of disease in man and beast. Cato teaches his readers, for example, how to plant osier-beds, to cultivate vegetables, to preserve the dishes. health of cattle, to pickle pork, and to make savoury He is shrewd and economical, but he never allows humanity to interfere with profits; for he recommends his readers to sell every thing which they do not want, even old horses and old slaves. He is a great conjuror, for he informs us that the most potent cure for a sprain is the repetition of the following hocus-pocus:"Daries dardaries astataries dissunapiter;" or, "Huat hanat huat hista pista sista domiabo damnaustra;" or, "Huat huat huat ista sis tar sis ordannabon dumnaus tra." This miscellaneous collection is preceded by an introduction, in which is maintained the superiority of agriculture over other modes of gaining a livelihood, especially over that of trade and money-lending. The early Roman orators are passed over somewhat slightly in this work. But we fully admit the weight of what is said in the Preface, that "if the reader finds some features, which he considers of great importance, rapidly touched upon, the extent of the subject, and the wish to compress it within a moderate compass, must be offered as the author's apology." "But this is no excuse for saying that "Patricians like the Gracchi stood forward as Plebeian tribunes" (p. 185). Professor Browne ought to have known that the Gracchi were members of one of the noble, though plebeian, families, the rise of which he correctly describes in his next page. The case of Clodius, about half a century later, should have made him remember that a man of Patrician birth could not be eligible as tribune of the people, unless he renounced his Patriciate, and-as Clodius did procured himself to be formally adopted into some plebeian family. It is also not substantially though it may be literally-accurate to say (p. 187) that no fragments remain of the orations of the elder Gracchus. Plutarch gives us Greek translations of portions of two very celebrated and very beautiful speeches of Tiberius Gracchus. Professor Browne refers to Plutarch for the character of Tiberius's oratory: if he had read much of Plutarch, he could hardly have missed the extracts. Coming to the Dî Majores of Latin literature, we find a critique on Lucretius of very high merit. We quote some portions of it, as displaying a breadth of view, a freedom from prejudice, and a love of truth, that do Professor Browne the highest honour. What he says respecting Lucretius as a poet forsaking the cold and heartless system of his own philosophy, of his defying nature, and all the fair objects of nature, is strongly applicable to our own Shelley. Professor Browne observes— Although he asserts that the phenomena of nature are the result of a combination of atoms, that these elementary particles are self-existent and eternal, he seems to invest Nature with a sort of personality. The warm sensibility of the poet overcomes the cold logic of the philosopher. Dissatisfied with the ungenial idea of an abstract lifeless principle, he yearns for the maternal caresses of a being endued with energies and faculties with which he can sympathise. He therefore ascribes to Nature an attribute which can only belong to an intelligent agent having ruling power. Nay, he even goes farther than this, and absolutely contradicts the dogmas of the Epicurean school. Even the works of nature are represented as instinct with life. The sun is spoken of as a being who, by the warmth of his beams, vivifies all things. The earth, from whose womb all things spring, fosters and nurtures all her children. The very stars may possibly be living beings, performing their stated motions in search of their proper sustenance. These are, doubtless, the fancies of the poet rather than the grave and serious belief of the philosopher; but they prove how false, hollow, and artificial is a system which pretends to account for creation by natural causes, and how earnestly the human mind craves after the comfort and support of a personal deity. The denial of the immortality of the soul is inferred from the destructibility of the material elements out of which it is composed. It must perish immediately that it is deprived of the protection of the body. In accordance with this psychical theory, he accounts for the difference of human tempers and characters. Character results from the combination of the elementary principles: -a predominance of heat produces the choleric disposition; that of wind produces timidity; that of air a calm and equable temper. But this natural constitution, the strength of the will, acted upon by education, is able, to a certain extent, to modify, though it cannot effect a complete change. Thus it is that, although moral as well as physical phenomena are produced in accordance with fixed laws, human ills result from unbridled passions, and may be remedied by philosophy. Although, if tried by a Christian standard, the Lucretian morality is by no means pure, yet even where he permits laxity he is not insensible to the moral beauty, the happy and holy results, of purity and chastity. Nor, notwithstanding the assertions of Cicero, can the charge of immorality or of a selfish love of impure pleasure be made against Lucretius or Epicurus. The distinction which the latter drew between lawful and unlawful pleasures was severe and uncompromising. The former speaks of the hell which the wicked sensualist always carries within his own breast-of the satisfaction of true wisdom, and of a conscience void of offence. ness. Again, Epicurus was a man of almost Christian gentleStoical grossness and contempt of refinement revolted him; the unamiable severity of that sect was alien to his nature. He was thus driven to the opposite extreme; and although he was careful to make pure intellectual pleasure the summum bonum, his standard laid him open to objections from his jealous adversaries. The zeal with which many distinguished females devoted themselves to his system, and became his disciples because his doctrines and character especially recommended themselves to the female sex, made it easy for his enemies to stigmatise them as effeminate, instead of praising them as feminine. With that illiberality which refused to woman freedom of conduct and a liberal education, his adversaries calumniated the characters of his pupils, represented them as unchaste, and their instructor as licentious. Nor did they hesitate even to support these accusations by forgeries. A careless reception of their calumnies without investigation, added to the general, and perhaps wilful, misapprehension which prevailed among the Romans in the days of Cicero, led to the misrepresentations which are found in his writings. These have been handed down to after ages; and thus the doctrines taught by Epicurus have been loaded with undeserved obloquy. There is, however, no doubt that Epicurism was adopted by the Romans in a corrupt form, and that it became fashionable because it was supposed to encourage indifferentism and sensuality. It is probable, too, that the denial of immortality contributed much to the depravation and distortion of his system. Nothing so surely demoralizes as destroying the hopes of eternity. Man cannot commune with God, or soar on high to spiritual things, unless he hopes to be spiritualized and to see God as He is. Whatever the philosopher may teach as to the true nature of happiness, man will set up his own corrupt standard, which his passions and appetites lead him to prefer: he will act on the principle, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Still it must be confessed that the views of Epicurus respecting man's duty to God were disinterested-founded on ideas of the Divine perfections, not merely on hopes of reward. His views of sensual pleasures were in accordance with his simple, frugal life, diametrically opposed to intemperance and excess. He taught by example as well as by precept, that he who would be happy must cultivate wisdom and justice, because virtue and happiness are inseparable. He attached his disciples to him by affection rather than by admiration; submitted to weakness and sickness with patient resignation; and died with a heroism which no Stoic could have surpassed. Catullus is disparaged in this volume. We must doubt either Professor Browne's knowledge of the writer whom he criticises, or his own power of feeling poetry, when we find him asserting (p. 229) that Catullus "had skill and taste to adopt the materials with which his vast erudition furnished him, and to conceal his want of originality and inspiration." Why, if ever a poet in this world had his soul full of genuine poetic inspiration, it was Catullus. Try him by the two best tests; first, by his power of expressing deep human feeling simply, sweetly, and so as to come home to the heart at once; and, secondly, by his sensibility to the objects of external nature, and his power of depicting the ideas which they suggest. Try him by either or both of these tests, and you will rank Catullus with Burns. Professor Browne has quoted, in this very volume, one of the exquisite poems of Catullus on his brother's death. We would appeal, also, to the sweet lines in the "Peninsularum Sirmio," on the blessing of returning to ease and one's own home Oh quid solutis est beatius curis, Cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino Then there is the address to himself on the folly of continuing to love a faithless fairMiser Catulle desinas ineptire Et quod vides perisse, perditum duces, &c. Moore has translated this, and justly praised it. But Moore had not the simplicity of Catullus. He failed accordingly in his version; and he would have failed worse had he tried the still more simple and beautiful poem on the same subject, which contains the couplet Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem ; Difficile est. Verum hoc qualibet efficias. We could adduce many more examples, but space forbids; and we must be brief with our proofs of the inspired eye with which Catullus viewed the beauties of nature. Could mere erudition have given him the wonderful third line in his celebrated comparison of a young maiden in the retirement of her home to the flower in the quiet garden ? Ut flos in septis secretus nascitur hortis, Ignotus pecori, nullo contusus æratro, Quem mulcent auræ, firmat sol, educat imber, &c. We will cite one passage from the old bard of Verona, and only one more. It is the stanza -quite in the same spirit as that which gave Scotland the "Lines on a Mountain Daisy on turning one up by the plough"-in which Catullus compares the downfall of slighted love to the fall of the flower at the extreme edge of the greensward, which the ploughshare grazes as it passes through the adjoining glebe Nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem ; The chapters on Cicero form, of course, one of the most important part of Professor Browne's volume. He succeeds better with Cicero as a philosopher than as an orator. There is much beauty, both of feeling and of expression, in the following observations on the moral excellence It has called our attention to a of Cicero. phase of the social life of the best of the Roman aristocracy, which we never had remarked before, and which is in many respects important. His age was not an age of poetry; but he paved the way for poetry by investing the language with those graces which are indispensable to its perfection. He freed it from all coarseness and harshness, and accustomed the educated classes to use language, even in their every-day conversation, which never called up gross ideas, but was fit for pure and noble sentiments. Before his time, Latin was plain-spoken, and therefore vigorous; but the penalty which was paid for this was, that it was language of the upper classes became in the days of Cicero sometimes gross and even indecent. The conversational in the highest degree refined: it admitted scarcely an offensive expression. The truth of this assertion is evident from those of his writings which are of the most familiar character: from his graphic Dialogues, in which he describes the circumstances as naturally as if they really occurred; from his Letters to Atticus, in which he lays open the secret thoughts of his heart to his most intimate friend, his second self. Cicero purified the language morally as well as æsthetically. It was the licen tious wantonness of the poets which degraded the pleasures of the imagination by pandering to the passions, at first in language delicately veiled, and then by open and dis gusting sensuality. It is difficult for us, perhaps, to whom religion comes under the aspect of revelation separate from philosophy, and who consider the philosophical investigation of moral subjects as different from the religious view of morals, to form an adequate conception of the pure and almost hely nature of the conversations of Cicero and his distinguished contemporaries. To them philosophy was the contempla tion of the nature and attributes of the Supreme Being. The metaphysical analysis of the internal nature of man was the study of immortality and the evidence for another life. Cato, for example, read the Phædo of Plato in his last moments in the same serious spirit in which the Christian would read the words of inspiration. The study of ethics was that of the sanctions with which God has supported duty and enlightened the conscience. They were the highest subjects with which the mind of man could be conversant. For men to meet together, as was the habitual practice of Cicero and his friends, and pass their leisure hours in such discussions, was the same as if Christians were to make the great truths of the Gospel the subjects of social converse. Again, if we examine the character of their lighter conversations when they turned from philosophy to literature, it was not mere gossip on the popular literature s the day it was not even confined to works written in their native tongue-it embraced the whole field of the literature of a foreign nation. They talked of poets, orators, philosophers, and historians, who were ancients to them as they are to us. They did not then think the subject of a foreign and ancient literature dull or pedantic They did not consider it necessary that conversation should be trifling or frivolous in order to be entertaining. We regret to find in this portion of Profes sor Browne's work another trace of imperfect reading, or of hasty writing, or both. He enumerates (p. 357), among Cicero's philoso phical writings, the "Paradoxa, in which the six celebrated Stoical paradoxes are touched upon in a light and amusing manner." Pro fessor Browne had better read them. He will find no levity or mirth in them. If, indeed, be stops short at the introduction, he will certainly find Cicero saying, "Illa ipsa quæ vix in gym nasiis et in otio Stoici probant ludens conjeci in communes locos." But this only means that Cicero wrote them as a literary exercise, and not for the sake of inculcating his own real opinions. But he took them up with all the zeal of a first-rate advocate; and they contain the most energetic passages that are to be found in the whole of his philosophical works. The fourth paradox, in which he assails the character of his old enemy Clodius, and the sixth, in which Crassus is the imagined mark of his invectives, are perfect models of fiery and almost savage vigour and earnestness. Our limits will not permit us to follow Professor Browne further into his delineations of the other Roman classical authors. They are fairly done, and will probably give information to many in a pleasing form, though there is not much in them that is very striking or very new. We readily admit that it is by no means easy to say any thing that shall be both new and The Homeric Dialect. THE mighty Homer, the preservation of whose wondrous Epics will be a source of rejoicing to mankind to the latest ages, combined within himself the highest characteristics of the poet, the statesman, the philosopher, the historian, and the priest. In analogy with this marvellous variety of excellence is the remarkable circumstance of his uniting in his poems all the various dialects of Greece. While the stately Xenophon confines himself to the Attic, the sweet-voiced Herodotus to the Ionic, the stal true about Virgil or Horace; and the same difficulty occurs, though in a less degree, when a critic approaches their contemporaries and their successors. Altogether, Professor Browne's work will find, and will deserve, readers. Whether the fact of such works being in request speaks in favour of the present state of English scholarship, is a serious question, and leads to others more serious still. When facilities are sought and given for obtaining knowledge about the Classics second-hand, it looks as if there were either a disability or a disinclination to seek the fountain heads. The latter may be the case; and it may imply no want of intellectual vigour, but only the encroaching necessity on the mind of educated England of becoming scientific rather than classical, while it yet wishes to retain the show of classicality. Whether this be so, and whether, if it be so, it be so for good or for evil, we cannot now pause to deliberate. By J. S. BAIRD. G. Bell. wart Theocritus to the Doric, &c., the great magician of antiquity, from whose inspirations all succeeding generations have largely drawn, combines them all in harmonious beauty. He, therefore, does good service to the cause of literature, who sets forth clearly and methodically these various dialects; and Mr. Baird shews himself fully competent to the task. The student of Homer will find all his inquiries in this respect answered by a series of tables, arranged so as to be at once and easily intelligible. Sketches and Characters, or the Natural History of the Human Intellects. By JAMES WILLIAM WHITECROSS. Saunders and Otley. 1853. THIS book contains nothing very profound, nor very new, and it will scarcely take a high place amongst the text-books of British literature. Still it groups together, in a not unpleasing manner, many observations that are only to be found in a multiplicity of authors. It opens with a chapter, which the author styles the "Natural History of the Human Intellects." We know not whether any of our statesmen will subscribe to the following description of the hurtful tendency of Parliamentary oratory to its possessor :— The tendency of parliamentary life is to develope and encourage ready wit at the expense of learning, deep thought, and close reasoning. The most vigorous minds, when taking a serious part in Parliamentary debates, are often inveigled to bring forth arguments that no man of sense would publish in writing-arguments which may pass unrefuted when set off with pointed language and luent delivery. They have, it is true, frequent occasions for developing their talent for debate; but the habit of loose reasoning is the more prejudicial, as the ablest of them usually takes a seat in Parliament at a very early age, before the mind has expanded to full maturity; and it is not always that they retain unimpaired those faculties which are required for close reasoning or enlarged speculation. This is doubtless a little overcharged. It would have been more true if the application had been restricted to the Parliamentary puppy so admirably described by Walter Scott Or is it he, the wordy youth, So early trained for stateman's part, As themes that he has got by heart; 6 Bridal of Triermain, Canto 2. *Single-speech Hamilton. |